Bing touts success of drive to sell off vacant lots in Detroit

6:11 PM, December 13, 2012

Ndue Lucaj, 51, of Detroit looks over the fence he built after purchasing the vacant lot next to his home through the city's "White Picket Fence Program" in Southwest Detroit, photographed on Thursday, Dec. 13, 2012. / KIMBERLY P. MITCHELL/Detroit Free Press

Saying “it’s nice to be somewhere that’s positive,” Detroit Mayor Dave Bing got some respite from the city’s fiscal crisis Thursday when he stood with residents of southwest Detroit and announced the expansion of a 9--month-old pilot project that expedites purchases of vacant city-owned lots by adjoining homeowners to discourage dumping and fight blight.

“I’m pleased to report that almost 100 vacant lots have been purchased,” Bing said.

“Now, we’re going to expand this to a new area that I’m very familiar with because, for about 30 years, that’s where my businesses were,” Bing said. His reference was to the North End neighborhood just north of Midtown, where Bing once operated the Bing Group, a conglomerate of auto suppliers.

The program — which city planning managers said now covers about 5% of the city, and that soon will roughly double in size — can’t cover 100% of the city because “our staff has been cut dramatically (and) we just don’t have the people” to handle a bigger program, Bing said.

The effort, called White Picket Fence, puts empty lots back on the tax rolls, gives homeowners space for gardens and parking, beautifies neighborhoods and even provides $200 in free fencing or landscaping material to the property owner, underwritten by Charter One Bank, said Brad Dick, the city’s director of general services.

Under the program, homeowners can quickly buy a vacant lot that adjoins their property for a blanket price of $200, avoiding the need for the usual approval by a vote of the Detroit City Council — a lengthy procedure, and usually mandatory for any sale of city-owned land, Dick said.

“If homeowners on either side want to buy it, we split the lot. But usually, just one wants it,” he said. Those who buy a lot bring their new deeds to a local nonprofit called Urban Neighborhood Initiatives, where they’re issued $200 gift cards provided by Charter One, said the nonprofit group’s executive director Dennis Nordmoe.

The gift cards are good only at Casey Fence Co. and Brooks Lumber, both nearby family businesses, “and that keeps the money in the neighborhood, so it’s another benefit to our area,” Nordmoe said.

A new sponsor — Fifth Third Bank — will pay for $25,000 in gift cards for fencing in the new phase of the program in the North End neighborhood, Bing spokeswoman Daphne Hughes said. The North End is bounded on the east by I-75, on the west by Woodward, on the north roughly by Chicago Boulevard and south by East Grand Boulevard.

For homeowner Vicki Chavez and her family in southwest Detroit, buying the lot next-door turned the family into landscapers. There were so many weeds growing there that her grandchildren called it “the forest,” Chavez said Thursday at Bing’s announcement in the Springwells Village neighborhood in southwest Detroit. Since buying the lot, she and her husband removed 45 bags of garbage and weeds, Chavez said.